We now have only six months to wait before it reaches Mars, when we will find out if the ESA knows the difference between yards and meters. Call me biased, but my money is on a yes to that.

NASA, of course, with all its super-duper fandangally pretty American technology and super-duper ohlookdidwereallywasteallthatmoney budget, is also launching Mars probes this month, although I’m not sure whether JPL have yet managed to learn how to count to ten with out taking off their shoes and socks.

For all their attempts to strut their stuff as the world’s leading space exploration agency, NASA couldn’t tie their own shoelaces without instructions and some nice big diagrams.

They haemorrhage money through inefficiency and incompetence, and their shiny mantra of “better faster cheaper” has ended up costing them dearly, and not just in terms of cold hard cash. The loss of both the Mars Orbiter and Polar Lander missions were serious PR disasters in themselves, but the cost in human, PR and scientific terms of the Columbia catastrophe is uncountable.

On the other hand, the ESA have been seen as also-rans for some time now, but with the launch of Mars Express and Beagle II, they prove that you can do real science in space on a tight budget, you just have to be a bit inventive about it.

I really hope that we get to hear the obvious line “The Beagle Has Landed” in six months time, and that we get some high quality data back from the red planet. Not only would it be a poke in NASA’s eye, but it would also give a huge boost to European space exploration.

After all, there’s no rule that says we can’t do it a lot better, cheaper and faster than NASA.

Meantime, though, the damn Celts are everywhere. Maybe.

The NY Times (registration required) and the International Herald Tribune both run stories on research that was done last year into the ancestry of a selection of British males which discovered that actually, the English aren’t all Anglo-Saxons, but often Celts. This implies, they say, that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t drive out the Celts, but married them instead.

The BBC commissioned the research for their tediously dull series Blood of the Vikings, which was about as watchable as a wallful of Dulux’s newest colour. The data has now been published in Current Biology, a medical rag where I used to work, hence, I think, people jumping on what is actually quite an old story.

(Well, they’re not jumping on the story because I used to work for Current Biology. Obviously. Although as an aside I would like to say that that particular job, as Editorial Assistant, does remain my longest ever job, and I left there in May 96. I was there nearly two years and jumped shortly before I was pushed, having become office photocopier queen and thus realising that there was, therefore, nothing left to achieve.)

It’s also an old story that’s contradicted by this piece on the BBC Wales website which discusses research showing that the Welsh are genetically different to the English. This suggests that the idea that the Anglo-Saxons pushed the Celts out of England into the Celtic fringe of Wales, Ireland and Scotland is actually more accurate than the theory that everyone got on spiffingly, shagged and made babies.

Me, I know the Welsh are different. They don’t have the laundry gene for one.

Queen of the May

Every year, on May Day, a young woman is stolen away by the faeries to become their Queen for a year. This year, though, the faeries have bitten off more than they can chew. Shakti Nayar will do whatever it takes to get her own life as a botanist back. As she struggles to work out how to get home, she uncovers Faerie’s dark secret and finds that she is not the only human who needs saving.

The Lacemaker

All the threads looked the same to the innocent eye, but Maude could see the black heart running up through one strand as it wove its way through the lace roundel. She busied herself with tidying her bobbins as a customer browsed the lace mats on her stall.

“I’ll take this one,” the woman said, holding up a square piece, twelve inches across. Maude winced, picked up the piece she had just completed and held it out to the woman for her consideration.

Argleton

Matt is fascinated by the story of Argleton, the unreal town that appeared on GeoMaps but which doesn’t actually exist. When he and his friend and flatmate Charlie are standing at the exact longitude and latitude that defines Argleton, Matt sets in motion a chain of events that will take him places he didn’t know existed… and which perhaps don’t.

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A Passion for Science

From the identification of the Horsehead Nebula to the creation of the computer program, from the development of in vitro fertilisation to the detection of pulsars, A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention brings together inspiring stories of how we achieved some of the most important breakthroughs in science and technology.